Postscript Printer Interface

[Rick Beetham]

A friend of mine is trying to get a postscript printer working with
his SUN SparcStation. He has got the machine talking to the printer
and if he puts the printer into Emulation mode (LASERJET, PROPRINTER
etc) he has no problem getting output.

However until today when I sat down with him for a bit he could not
get any TEXT output while in postscript mode.  For a while he
thought it was his printer so he connected it to another box that
was using a postscript printer with interleaf and voila it worked!
Further investigation showed that the other box has a compiled
printer interface supplied by INTERLEAF. His box has none and so he
will have to build one.

Experimentation has shown us that postscript is a completely
different kettle of fish from anything that we are presently used
to. I did succeed in helping him "discover" some of the commands
needed to get text output from the printer however - the docs are
HORRIBLE and do not even list what commands are available (commands
were gleaned from two small sample files). The printer comes with a
whole raft of friendly "setup tools" that run in MS DOS or on a MAC
but nothing for UNIX or SUN OS.

Can anybody offer us any script models or interface source that we
can modify and compile in order to get this beast working. If memory
serves me right the printer is a QMS if that helps.

Also if anyone can point me towards any documentation regarding
postscript printers in general (ie. commands, interfaces etc) I
would be most grateful.

Postings to this newsgroup or direct email is both appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Rick Beetham

--
{...}isishq!kesrith!rjbeeth    | Nepean, Ontario
rjbeeth at isishq.fidonet.org